Attending Heatly is in the family for our next teacher spotlight, Erica McCarthy! Mrs. McCarthy is a Green Island native and grew up in the local community. She’s a Heatly alumna, having attended the school for eleven years. She graduated in 2005 alongside her now-husband, and spent the next several years caring for their five children as a stay-at-home mom.
In 2018, Mrs. McCarthy returned to Heatly as a staff member. She’s currently the Turn Around Room Facilitator, which is a room where students go to take a break, decompress, work on their coping skills and resolve peer conflicts.
When asked what she enjoys most about her job, Mrs. McCarthy said it’s building relationships with both students and their families. With Heatly being a small school, Mrs. McCarthy is able to develop those relationships over time and support families as students progress through their education.
With a passion for learning and seeing students succeed, it’s no surprise that Mrs. McCarthy is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in education. She states that “the absolute best part of my job is seeing the impact that I have on students, and of course the huge hugs and smiles that I get daily.”
When she’s not working at Heatly, Mrs. McCarthy enjoys spending her free time with her family, their dog and two cats. Sometimes this entails going to different sporting events that her children are involved in. Mrs. McCarthy also takes a yearly summer vacation with her family to the beach.
A fun fact about Mrs. McCarthy is that Mrs. Starr, Mr. Ford, Mrs. Mazzeo and Mr. Manning were all her teachers while she was a student at Heatly and they now help teach her five children.